New Technology, Old Problems

One of the oldest promotional concepts – probably the oldest concept that can be classified as “advertising,” in fact – is the idea of putting up a sign with a picture of your product somewhere where people who might want to buy that product can see it. Of course, over the years we’ve seen the technology evolve from hand-painted signs to giant billboards, to moving/animated billboards, and eventually to giant flat-screen monitors broadcasting actual audio-visual commercial programs to us while we drive. I felt that this arms race had reached its logical conclusion in the appearance of mobile billboards – signs that actually drive up in front of you to make sure you can see them – until examples of these vehicles incorporating dioramas of living-room décor (IKEA), flat-screen monitors (the one I saw was for some energy drink, but theoretically you could put any ad you wanted on these), and large clear boxes containing a stripper pole and half-naked women (various strip clubs) began appearing on the roads. But as extreme as these examples might be, I think the development I read about this week is even worse…

According to a story appearing on the Sun UK website, a Japanese firm has invented a new form of billboard that uses sensors to determine who is looking at it, and then displays content relevant to that individual’s interests. For the moment, the recognition software is somewhat limited (e.g. if the sensors detect that you’re male, it pulls up a car ad, whereas if they detect that you’re female you get a cosmetics ad), but these systems are already being refined for applications like security/facial recognition systems, and it should eventually be possible for the computer to assess your age, ethnicity, height, weight, socioeconomic status, or even whether you’ve eaten, drunk or slept recently. The potential for targeting advertising is amazing; unfortunately, so are all of the problems one encounters with more traditional forms of promotional signage…

Consider, for example, that when a huge flat-screen billboard was put up facing an intersection in Los Angeles, the number of traffic accidents there rose exponentially – because people were looking at the fascinating images instead of the road. Now imagine how much worse that would be if the billboard recognized the driver and pulled up an image that was specifically intended to attract his or her attention. The possible images would be constrained by who wanted to advertise on that site (as well as by local indecency/pornography laws), but that wouldn’t prevent some very distracting images from flashing at bad moments. Then there’s the issue of all of the energy such installations would use (and the pollution that generating the electricity would entail), the light pollution they will produce when operating at night (you wouldn’t want to have a window facing one), and the fact that they block your view of virtually anything else. And then there are the potential social and legal issues…

Imagine if you had small children who kept seeing ads for horror movies, funeral homes, women’s underwear, or strip clubs, just because people with an interest in those subjects kept walking past an interactive billboard while you were around. Or, if you prefer, imagine how the religious fundamentalists in your neighborhood would react if one of these installations started promoting some denomination they didn’t care for, or even worse, one of those “atheist billboard” messages we keep hearing about. For that matter, suppose somebody put up one of these where the light from the screen kept coming in your windows. Would you sue? Can you honestly imagine that nobody else would? What if multiple parties sued and counter-sued, demanding that something be taken down or that their images (whatever those might be) get equal time? For that matter, how could you possibly keep some advertisers from paying extra to make sure that THEIR ad was more likely to come up than the others stored in the installation’s memory?

Of course, most of these problems already exist; I’m not saying that billboards that you watch are any better than billboards that watch you. I’m just pointing out that this industry already has a number of issues – and that it would be naïve to assume that new technology won’t make any or all of them worse…